Can it be that both kinds of flowers are descended
from forms resembling each other in want of grace and colour? Such,
indeed, is the truth. But how, as the generations of the flowers
succeeded one another, did differences so striking come about? In our
rambles afield let us seek a clue to the mystery. It is late in
springtime, and near the border of a bit of swamp we notice a clump of
violets: they are pale of hue, and every stalk of them rises to an
almost weedy height.

[Illustration: Wild Rose, Single]

Twenty paces away, on a knoll of dry ground, we find more violets, but
these are in much deeper tints of azure and yellow, while their stalks
are scarcely more than half as tall as their brethren near the swamp.
Six weeks pass by. This time we walk to a wood-lot close to a brimming
pond. At its edge are more than a score wild-rose bushes. On the very
first of them we see that some of the blossoms are a light pink, others
a pink so deep as to seem dashed with vivid red. And while a flower here
and there is decidedly larger and more vigorous than its fellows, a few
of the blossoms are undersized and puny: the tide of life flows high and
merrily in a fortunate rose or two, it seems to ebb and falter by the
time it reaches one or two of their unhappy mates. As we search bush
after bush we are at last repaid for sundry scratches from their thorns
by securing a double rose, a "sport," as the gardener would call it. And
in the broad meadow between us and home we well know that for the quest
we can have not only four-leaved clovers, but perchance a handful of
five and six-leaved prizes. The secret is out. Flowers and leaves are
not cast like bullets in rigid moulds, but differ from their parents
much as children do. Usually the difference is slight, at times it is as
marked as in our double rose. Whenever the change in a flower is for the
worse, as in the sickly violets and roses we have observed, that
particular change ends there--with death. But when the change makes a
healthy flower a little more attractive to its insect ministers, it will
naturally be chosen by them for service, and these choosings, kept up
year after year, and century upon century, have at last accomplished
much the same result as if the moth, the bee, and the rest of them had
been given power to create blossoms of the most welcome forms, the most
alluring tints, the most bewitching perfumes.

In farther jaunts afield we shall discover yet more. It is